This Designer's Candy-Colored Coats Will Be on Every Cool Girl Next Fall

Native New Yorker Sandy Liang is one to watch.

CURRICULUM VITAE: A second-generation Chinese-American who grew up in Bayside, Queens, Liang graduated from New York City's über-competitive, STEM-focused Stuyvesant High School and enrolled at the Rhode Island School of Design, intending to study architecture. She transferred to Parsons The New School for Design in Manhattan after one semester and changed her major to fashion design. "I'm a city girl at heart," she says.

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MADE IN CHINATOWN: Liang is not the first in her family to work in the fashion industry; her maternal grandmother spent the late 1990s as a seamstress in Chinatown. "She always says, 'Let me know if you ever need Grandma to come and make patterns for you,'" the designer says. "But she's my precious, precious grandma—I would never make her work!" While in school and living downtown, Liang interned for Jason Wu, Richard Chai, 3.1 Phillip Lim, and Opening Ceremony.

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WRAP UP WARM: Inspired by the idea of the ultimate girl gang, with members real and imagined—which, to her mind, naturally includes Chloë Sevigny, Kate Moss, and Margot Tenenbaum—Liang created an Instagram-bait collection of candy-colored fur coats when she graduated just two years ago. They were immediately snapped up by a roster of below-14th-Street types, including model Soo Joo Park, fashion consultant Aziza Azim, and stylist Kate Foley, during a very cold New York Fashion Week that coincided with last year's polar vortex. For fall 2015, Liang has rounded out the line with cigarette pants, frayed-denim flares, and sheer tops. "I think it's a very sort of New Yorker trait to spend your money on a great coat," the designer says. "And then wear, like, the same three sweaters and two pairs of pants over and over."

PRICES: From $315 for a pair of frayed-denim flares to $6,250 for a baby-blue shearling coat.